Living Deeply in a Shallow Age
Living Deeply in a Shallow Age
“I wished to live deliberately...and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived... I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life” -- Henry David Thoreau from Walden
I’m going to be honest and admit that I’ve never actually finished Walden.
I tried once. It was summer vacation, and I was about twenty years old, sitting on a plane from Kansas City to Boston. I was in that pretentious college student phase where I thought reading classic literature, philosophy, and nonfiction “for fun” on my school breaks made me sophisticated.
I wanted to like Walden; I really did. A cabin in the woods, an escape from society—it sounded right up my alley. But I only got through about three chapters before I couldn’t take Thoreau’s ranting anymore. I’m pretty sure I gave up and switched to a magazine, and I haven’t felt much temptation to try again in the intervening eight years.
However, I recently stumbled on that famous quote again, and it spoke to me. More accurately, it haunted me. It kept slipping into my consciousness, taunting me, tapping me on the shoulder, and demanding my attention.
“I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”
I’ve seen this quote floating around many times before. It’s paraphrased on bumper stickers, notebook covers, and inspirational Instagram captions.
Every time I’ve encountered the quote, it’s sparked something within me, but never like this.
Something about it is stirring up my innards, forcing me into self-examination. I feel the words looming over me like the officer in a cop show, shining the harsh interrogation light onto my life and pressuring me into a confession.
Am I living deliberately?
Am I living deeply?
Am I living at all?
My knee-jerk responses to those questions terrified me.
Like Thoreau, I fear the prospect of lying on my deathbed and discovering that I had forgotten to truly live while I was alive. I fear discovering— only after it’s too late—that I wasted a perfectly good life.
And my life is good, generally speaking.
I have a roof over my head, food on my table, and gas in my car. I adore my husband. I have fabulous friends. I come from a loving family. I’m obsessed with my curmudgeonly fifteen year-old dog (even when he wakes me up at two in the morning). By many metrics, I’m living the dream.
And yet sometimes, I spend so much time dreaming that I forget to live.
Sometimes I feel like I’m sleepwalking through life. Like the days bleed together, the weeks sprint along, the seasons disappear into each other until one day I blink and three years have passed. As I near the end of my twenties, I can’t help but feel that I somehow forgot to be young while I had the chance.
Now, I don’t want to be overly dramatic, nor do I want to sound ungrateful. I have had plenty of moments in which I paused along the way to appreciate my life. I really do try to slow down to smell the roses on occasion. And like anyone, I have those flashbulb memories that feel vivid and rich with detail—those beautiful moments when time seems to have grown more expansive through retrospect.
But I don’t want to live through my memories. I want to savor every drop of the moment before it becomes a memory.
I want to live, not just remember living.
Sometimes my life feels like taking a bullet train through a gorgeous landscape. I technically saw the sights. I appreciated the view for thirty seconds through the window as the train sped across the tracks on its way to some more important destination. But can I really say I’ve seen a place that I only briefly passed through?
My soul longs for a life where I can get off the train, breathe the crisp air, feel the grass under my feet, throw my hands in the air, and twirl around a la Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. I may have seen the sights from the smudged window, but I’m bypassing the experience. And I know I’m not alone in that feeling.
As a therapist, I have the privilege of listening to people’s thoughts and fears on a regular basis, and for years I have sensed a collective desire for deeper living. It’s what’s missing from many therapy modalities, and it’s what’s missing from most of our lives. True mental wellness—true aliveness—requires more than symptom reduction.
From conversations with friends to posts from strangers on social media to sessions in my therapy office, I have been continually confronted with this mass yearning for something more. More joy, more purpose, more connection, more peace, more presence. And a need for something less. Less stress, less rushing, less scrolling, less complication, less chaos.
Essentially, we long for a different way of life. We long to slow down enough to experience the fullness of the moment, to squeeze out every last drop and let the flavor linger on our tongues.
The problem is we can’t all quit our jobs and move to a cabin in the woods. Even if we could, I doubt that would really solve anything.
We must find this new way of living within ourselves, within the confines of our own reality.
It’s one thing to live deeply when you’re on vacation in a gorgeous location with few distractions or responsibilities, but I want to carry that feeling with me into the mundanity and stress of daily life.
I want to live deeply in the everyday.
Though it may be hard, I do believe it’s possible. And I’m making it my mission to discover how (and to help others do the same).
I was planning on spending some time in this essay analyzing what went wrong in our society that has led so many of us to crave a new way of life. I found it easy to point the finger of our collective discontent at social media or chronic overscheduling or corporate culture or capitalism or any number of aspects of our modern era (and I do believe that all of those things make deep living extraordinarily challenging in the 21st century).
But as I was writing about the woes of our modern era, I realized something; this desire for deeper living isn’t new. Thoreau wrote about it in the 1850s. The Stoics wrote about it in Ancient Rome. There are aspects of it woven within spiritual, religious, and philosophical texts across time and culture. Wanting to live more deeply seems to be a feature of the human condition, and people have likely wrestled with this concept in some shape or form since the beginning of time.
But now it’s our turn.
It’s time for a new generation to wrestle with the age-old question—this time within a societal context that thwarts deep living at every turn. How do we “suck out all the marrow of life,” get off the bullet train, end our sleepwalking, and take our lives back?
How do we live deeply in a shallow age?
This project is my attempt to find out. Everything you’ll read, hear, or practice here is aimed at that one goal—learning to trade autopilot for aliveness. I’ll be blending my personal experiences and insights with my professional expertise and my passion for teaching and facilitation to create something new—an online community/newsletter/studio/classroom/retreat center designed to be a hub for deep living in the everyday. We’ll combine insight with action, reflection with real world application, and curiosity with community to help you create the life you want to be living.
If this is resonating with you–if you feel that same existential tug–please consider subscribing so you can join me on this mission to live more deeply (and to help others do the same).
And if you’d like to spread the word, please share this with a friend (or two or ten). I’m trying to build a genuine community of like-minded people, and I’d love your help reaching as many as possible.
Finally, I invite you to introduce yourself in the comments. What has made you feel alive lately? I’d love to know.
Journaling/Reflection Questions:
Centered with Abby is all about sparking introspection to help you turn insight into action. I invite you to use the following questions to inspire some reflection this week. Feel free to use these as journaling prompts, conversation topics with friends or family, or simply questions to ponder throughout your week.
How does the Thoreau quote at the beginning of the article make you feel? Read it again and notice your gut response. What does it make you think about? What emotions does it stir up within you? Does it evoke a physical reaction?
What does “living deeply” mean to you? Do you feel like you are living deeply or is that something you’d like to work on?
If you knew that your time on earth was limited, what would you change about the way that you’re living?
Can you think of a time when you were truly “living deeply”? Was there something about the circumstances, your actions or mindset, or any other factor that helped you live more deeply during this time? How can you draw inspiration from that time?
What is one small step you can take this week to move toward more presence and aliveness?
Lovely